To Create. To Live

I was not Dreaming

I was not dreaming, for I only dream in the dark when I am tucked away. I was not dreaming when I walked over the docks of my kin and stepped into the waters that reflect my sisters. The water is always cold and I'd be loathed to feel otherwise, so my eyelashes froze and my blood vanished and I felt I was home. The strangest thing about the water is how we always return to the surface elsewhere. We move and cannot cease. The water is what delivered me to a late autumn wood, where we walk over moss and the skeletons of our guardians wait. I walked longer than I did, and I watched for the sight the water wanted me to see. It stood, greater than the world, and just as tall as me. A tree that burned from the inside, I thought for a moment that I would be Moses, and my Lord was here to call on me. I knelt before it and kissed the roots that held me. The incredible heat struck me the way it is to wake from a nightmare, and my ice retreated. It was a willow I thought, a willow like me, with leaves of ash that grew as fast as they crumbled. They drooped to greet me only to flee to the gale at my touch, they leave my throat grey. But I also believed it to be a twisted Jacaranda; the flames that crawled beyond the cradle of the bark flickered lilac and lavender and stopped. The burning halted mid-dance and became blossoms. The blossoms fell into my hair as if to crown me in my singleness and waste, to refuse perfection and sanctify me in place of it. I tried to breathe for the first time and the fire found my lungs and rooted into my heart. It beat and the fire billowed, my pulse returned with warmth and rage and I screamed for the catharsis and I was not in pain. Is this what it's like to be loved, I had thought, to know that some other heart beat was this ferocious? But I am wrong, as I am and will always be. This is what it is to love. To love with agape and faith. I, with my violet hands and earthly eyes became my namesake and burned from the inside because I was full of love. Because I can only stand when it is to stand in front of another. Because my brightest anger flares in defense. Because my body is expendable, because it will take me first every time, I will make sure of it. Because I will burn forever if I could be anything of that willow. If I can be warm and beautiful. I burn from the inside not because I am sent to call prophets for my Lord but because I am capable of holding them in the dark and in the cold. I do not dream. I only burn. And in my burning I made the ocean glow and I brought thousands home. I was not dreaming when my disaster resurrected me and planted lilacs in my hair. I am The Burning Willow, and I will be the mother.